Seven Ancient Wonders (22 page)

West approached the island and its flight of steps cautiously— the whole flight was probably just one great big trigger stone.

He scanned the skeleton.

Saw a pair of spindly wire-framed glasses still sitting on its nose, saw the red swastika armband, saw the purple amethyst ring on its bony right hand, the ring of a Nazi Party founding member.

‘Hessler. . . ’ he gasped in recognition. It was Hermann Hessler, the Nazi archaeologist, one-half of the famed Hessler–Koenig team.

Oddly, the skeleton’s right hand was outstretched, seemingly
reaching
down the steps, as if it had been Hessler’s last earthly movement, grasping for. . . 

. . . a battered leatherbound notebook that lay on the bottom step.

West grabbed the notebook, flipped it open.

Pages of diagrams, lists, and drawings of each of the Ancient Wonders stared back at him, interspersed with German notes written in Hermann Hessler’s neat handwriting.

Suddenly, his earpiece roared to life:

‘
Jack! Zoe!
’ Wizard’s voice called. ‘
You have to hide! Judah’s going to be there any moment now—’

West spun, just as a bullet sizzled out of the entry tunnel behind him and whizzed over his head, missing his scalp by centimetres.

‘You two, that way!’ he ordered Zoe and Lily to the left side of the doorway, while he himself scampered to the right of the stone doorframe, peered back, and saw dark shadows rising up the tunnel, approaching fast.

Decision time.

There was no way he could get to the podium containing the Lighthouse’s Mirror and the Mausoleum’s Pillar before Judah’s force arrived. No way to allow Lily to glimpse their carved incantations.

His eyes scanned the chamber for an escape.

There was some open space on the far side of the island, but it offered no escape: only the wide granite dam that held back the pool of superhot mud lay over there—presumably waiting to be set off by the trigger-stone steps.

And in an instant, it all made sense: the rising tunnel with the clumps of dried mud at its edges, the guttered path in the hall below
and the similarly gutter-lined stairs down at the Great Arch: this molten mud, when released from its dam, would flow
around
the raised island containing the Mirror and Pillar and then down through the Refuge, all the way to the water in the chasm, killing any crypt-raiders in the process and protecting the two Pieces.

The half-bodied Nazi skeletons, melted at the waist, now also made sense: they’d been killed trying to outrun the mud. Hessler himself must have been trapped atop the podium as it had been surrounded by the stuff. He had then died in perhaps the worst way of all—of starvation, in the dark, alone. His buddy, Koenig, must have escaped somehow and trekked across the desert to Tobruk.

Among the many statue alcoves that lined the circular wall of the chamber, West also saw two smaller openings on either side of the main entry doorway.

They were low arched tunnels, maybe a metre high—and elevated slightly above the floor of the chamber by about 2 feet.

West didn’t know what they were, and right now he didn’t care.

‘Zoe! That little tunnel! Get Lily out of here!’

Zoe swept Lily into the low arched tunnel on their side of the doorway, while West himself charged over to the right-hand one and peered down it.

The low tunnel disappeared downwards in a long dead-straight line.

‘No choice,’ he said aloud.

He ducked inside the little arched tunnel—just as Zoe and Lily did the same on the other side of the chamber—a bare second before Judah’s force swept into the holy chamber.

At that exact same moment, four tiny figures were hustling across the superhigh aqueduct bridge that spanned the left arm of the Y-junction.

Led by the frumpy but determined Pooh Bear they looked like a team of tightrope walkers. But they made it across and disappeared into the small metre-high arched tunnel on the far side.

Marshall Judah stepped into the domed chamber and gazed up at the Mirror and the Pillar.

He grinned, satisfied.

His eyes searched the area for West—scanning the many alcoves, nooks and crannies.

No sign of him. Yet.

He called: ‘I know you’re in here, Jack! My, my, twice in two days. Looks like you’ve failed again. . . ’

His men fanned out, searching the chamber, guns up.

West backed down his little arched tunnel, praying that the darkness concealed him.

As he moved, he drew his H&K pistol from his thigh holster and aimed it up the tunnel—when with startling suddenness, a CIEF trooper appeared at the top of the tunnel, gun up!

West’s finger balanced on his trigger—firing might save him momentarily, but it would also give away his position. . . 

But the trooper didn’t fire.

He just peered down the tunnel, squinting, searching.

He couldn’t see West
. . .

But then the CIEF trooper reached for the pair of night-vision goggles hanging from his belt.

At the same time, in the domed chamber itself, Marshall Judah was evaluating the podium-island in the middle of the room with a
portable X-ray scanner.

The staircase giving access to the island was indeed one great big trigger stone. And the domed roof was solid diorite—offering no purchase for drilled handholds.

The situation was clear, and typical of Imhotep VI: to get onto the raised island, you had to trigger the trap.

Which meant Judah and his men would have to be quick.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘It is an Imhotep VI, Type 4 trap. Time will be short. Prepare the rollers. I want an eight-man lifting team for the Mirror Piece, and a four-man team for the Pillar Piece.’

‘Do you want us to take the Mirror and the Pillar themselves?’ one lieutenant asked.

‘I don’t give a shit about the Mirror and the Pillar. All I want are the Pieces,’ Judah snapped.

The CIEF men got into position.

They brought forward two six-wheeled ‘roller units’—to convey the heavy Pieces out.

‘Okay, here we go,’ Judah said.

And with those words, he trod on the first step of the staircase, setting off the deadly trap mechanism.

At that moment, several things happened.

The trooper who had been peering down West’s tunnel placed his night-vision goggles to his eyes—and immediately saw West, crouched in the tunnel like a trapped animal.

The trooper whipped up his Colt Commando—

Bam!

Gunshot.

From West.

The trooper dropped dead, hit right between the eyes.

In the chamber, three other CIEF men saw their comrade go down and they charged for the right-hand arched tunnel, leading with their guns.

But at the exact moment the CIEF trooper fell, Judah had
stepped on the stairway, setting off its trap mechanism.

And the mighty nature of that trap meant he didn’t see the CIEF trooper behind him fall.

For as Judah stepped onto the trigger stone, the great granite dam at the far end of the chamber instantly began to lower,
releasing the pool of boiling volcanic mud behind it into the chamber!

With a titanic whoosh, the foul stinking body of mud oozed over the lowering dam and began to fan out slowly into the round chamber.

Judah’s men rushed forward, clambering up onto the central island, where they pushed the Mirror and Pillar from their bases.

The spreading body of mud split into two fat fingers that oozed around both sides of the island. . . 

A quick wipe to each base revealed its glittering golden surface beneath the layer of ash.

Then the CIEF teams grabbed the two bases, moving fast.

The fingers of mud were two-thirds of the way around the island now and moving quickly, ready to devour anything that lay in their paths. . . 

Leaving the Pharos’s Mirror and the Mausoleum’s Pillar lying pathetically on their sides on the island, Judah’s team bounded off the raised platform, returning to the chamber’s main doorway just as the two creeping fingers of molten mud enveloped the base of the island and touched, surrounding the island completely, sealing it off.

But the mud continued to flow, spreading ever
outward. . . 

Judah’s eight-man A-team loaded the Mirror’s base onto one of the six-wheeled rollers—a couple of them noting that unlike the other Piece, the Pharos Piece had a human-shaped indentation carved into its underside. Curious. But they didn’t have time to examine it now.

The B-team loaded the Mausoleum Piece onto their roller.

And then they were off, led by Judah, racing back down the entry tunnel with the two large golden trapezoids in their midst.

By this time, the three CIEF men who had seen West’s victim fall arrived at the right-hand arched tunnel—but with the spreading mud closing in behind them.

Guns up, they peered down the tunnel and saw West, trapped, dead to rights. . . 

. . . a moment before they were all assailed by a withering volley of gunfire from somewhere behind them.

The three CIEF men convulsed in grotesque spasms, erupting in a thousand blood-spurts, peppered by automatic gunfire.

This volley of gunfire had come from the
left
-hand arched tunnel, on the other side of the main entrance, where Pooh Bear and Big Ears now stood, their Steyr-AUG and MP-7 sub-machine guns still smoking!

Guided only by Wizard’s incomplete sketch of the Refuge, they had guessed—correctly—that their aqueduct’s tunnel led to the same place as the fortress’s main ascending tunnel.

West ran to the top of his tunnel, peered out, saw his lifesaving team-mates on the other side of the lava-filled chamber—saw Lily and Zoe safely in their midst.

He would have yelled his thanks, but he arrived there just in time to see the spreading body of mud reach his tunnel’s raised entrance and
swallow
the corpses of the four CIEF men as it went by.

The molten mud just seared right through their bodies, liquefying them in an instant, before oozing over them,
absorbing them
into its mass.

It was the same on the other side of the chamber—the creeping body of mud had just flowed across the entrance to Pooh Bear’s little tunnel and was now heading quickly towards the main doorway of the domed chamber.

The effect was simple.

West was now cut off from both his comrades on the far side of the chamber
and
from the main entrance.

And the level of the flowing mud river was
rising
.

Any second now, it would rise up over the lips of the two arched aqueduct tunnels . . . and flow down them!

From the look on his face, Pooh Bear had seen this, too.

‘Pooh Bear! Get out of here!’ West called.

‘What about you!’ Pooh yelled back.

West nodded back down his aqueduct tunnel. ‘No other option! I have to go this way!’

‘Jack!’ Wizard called.

‘What!’

‘Judah used a tunnel-boring vehicle to drill
through
the old filled-in excavation tunnel! They must be planning to take the Pieces out that way! Check your sketch! You may still be able to get a look at the Pieces! All may not be lost!’

‘I’ll do my best!’ West nodded at the expanding mud pool. ‘Now get out of here! Call Sky Monster! Get to the
Halicarnassus
! I’ll catch up somehow!’

And with that, West’s team split, went their separate ways, disappearing into the two arched tunnels on either side of the domed chamber—the chamber whose perfectly round floor was now little more than a lake of stinking dark mud, a lake that surrounded a raised island containing the only existing remains of two Ancient Wonders, now lying discarded and broken on their sides.

West bolted down his aqueduct tunnel as fast as his legs could carry him. It was long and tight and dead-straight.

In the main tunnel of the fortress, Marshall Judah and his two teams were also hustling, pushing their six-wheeled rollers—bearing the two Pieces of the Capstone—down the slope.

They rushed through the many-pillared hall of the fortress before they emerged in the chasm and raced down the guttered rampway that stretched down from the front of the Refuge.

While in the left-hand aqueduct tunnel, Pooh Bear, Big Ears, Stretch, Wizard, Zoe and Lily also rushed headlong through their own tight dark passageway.

All three groups ran for good reason—for in the domed chamber high behind them, the radially-expanding mud lake finally reached the edge of the round room and began to rise up and over the lips of the three tunnels. . . 

. . . at which point it flooded rapidly down each of them!

Three surging fingers of mud roared down the three sloping tunnels.

Since they were tight and small, the two rivers of mud flowing down the aqueduct tunnels moved faster than the one flowing down the wider main tunnel.

As he ran, West turned to see the boiling hot liquid pouring down the tunnel behind him. It moved powerfully, relentlessly, as if it had a will of its own, a will bent on destroying any living thing in its path.

Then, abruptly, West burst out into open space—and found
himself standing on the high aqueduct bridge that spanned the right-hand arm of the Y-junction.